Well Jon, walks can be a difficult and expensive thing to animate. You even said yourself that more than once while working on Ren and Stimpy you cut the characters from the waste up simply so you wouldn't have to animate the walk cycle, no offense. But I do agree that walks these days are very plain, stiff and boring compared to their peers from the 40's through the 60's.

How true it is that walk cycles can be entertaining, but aren't anymore. Sometimes they're the best thing in a film.

My favourite walk cycle of all time is Stimpy's "shuffle walk" in Big House Blues and the R&S opening (which is accompanied by Ren hopping.) You once told me it was only three frames per step on 1's. That's incredible that you were able to squeeze such joy out of such few drawings.

I would think with the frames doubled every now and then to get the timing of 24 frames to match up with 29.95 hz NTSC, that it would be difficult to tell exactly how a walk cycle was done. Maybe its not a problem from DVDs, and a frame is just a frame.

I wasn't counting a repetitive walk cycle every seven frames though... the second step took more frames.

Unless they've changed the way televisions work in the last two years, there isn't a single TV in America ( different with PAL TVs in Europe ) that can show 24 frames ( or pixels ) a second.

When you watch a movie on DVD, what you're looking at is something shot at 24 fps being shown on something at 29.95 or whatever.

Back in the day, you could see the effects of this much easier when you slowed down the movie to frame-by-frame; every third 'frame' you'd see half of one frame and half of the one coming next, due to interlacing. Now that popular videos are being de-interlaced, the translation is shown in the form of 'held' frames.

"The way it works is they repeat every 4th frame to make 24fps add up to 30fps"

I'm actually shocked at how WELL that works most of the time, because it feels as though it really shouldn't.I have, for example, a lot of Clampett's greatest cartoons on DVD, and yes, the colours are wrong and some things are a bit messed up, but the movement looks to be intact - in that it absolutely kicks everything else's ass around the block. What else is new, right?

Stepping through the cartoons, however, I can see evidence of that frame-rate trick. I would think that altering the frame count on something like that -especially using a mathematical method that is entirely unrelated to what's onscreen- would pretty much destroy it's intended effect, but it doesn't. Frankly, that baffles me.

Even though I get a kick out of how the dog in BillPlympton's "Guard Dog" bounces to get around instead of actuallywalking I'm wondering if he chose that gait for the dog so he wouldn't have to put the workin for making an actual walk(that's also entertaining).

It could be that I'm being tooanalytical to the point ofbeing anal-is-too-tight-ical.

The "bounce to get around" is agood contrast to when the dogfreezes in contemplation aboutwhat nearby animals and peoplecould possibly do to harm itsowner - and it's pretty funnyfor how a dog would move around.

The two parts where the dog isshown actually walking is from3:07--3:11 and 4:05--4:18. The first one is regular walkingand the second one involves thetwist of the whole cartoon.

John, if given the chance,would you have advised Bill to liven up the dog's walking in 3:07--3:11? I'm not askingabout 4:05--4:18 since I think the strained walking is perfectfor the dog's situation there.

I'm thinking you would havesince he put the effort in tohave the funny "bounce to getaround" gait. Why have the dogstart walking normally in 3:07--3:11?